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The good and the bad of PDFs

Following up on Can Proprietary Formats make Government More Open? :

Josh Tauberer of govtrack.us, points us to The good and the bad of PDFs (OpenGovData.org wiki) in which Kevin Lyons, who works for the Nebraska legislature, wrote up some guidelines for PDF in government.

Lyons reminds us that not all PDF files are equal and he enumerates some of the advantages and disadvantages of encapsulating government information in PDFs.

Given how popular the PDF standard itself is, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the term PDF actually covers a wide variety of different types of files. While all PDF files fit the PDF standard, there are several different subtypes of PDF that are helpful in the government world.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


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